Posted on 03/05/2004 11:41:27 AM PST by .cnI redruM
Winds clocked at 67 mph blew a mobile home in Harker Heights partially of its supports and tore the roofs off a local restaurant and a high school auditorium in Killeen when a line of severe thunderstorms swept through the region Thursday afternoon.
While work crews from Oncor and the Texas Department of Transportation were busy with downed traffic lights and power lines along Veterans Memorial Boulevard in Harker Heights, no one was at the home of Sandy Rideout, whose residence in the Pleasant View Mobile Home Park was partially blown off its supporting pillars.
"I'm still in shock," said the 44-year-old Mickey's store clerk, who couldn't get off from work to take care of the emergency.
"The funny thing about it is, I just made my last payment on it," Rideout said.
Despite the severe winds and a tornado watch issued Thursday afternoon, a spokesman from the Fort Worth office of the National Weather Service said there were no reports of tornadoes touching down in Bell County.
The Associated Press reported the same line of storms produced winds of 60-80 mph that ripped off roofs and store awnings, flipped mobile homes, knocked down power lines and uprooted trees in at least a dozen Texas counties Thursday.
There were no immediate reports of deaths or serious injuries.
Though the storms moved quickly through the Killeen area, two major power lines in the area were disabled, said Carol Peters, a TXU spokeswoman. As of Thursday evening, TXU did not know how many people were affected by the outage, but Peters said Harker Heights felt the largest impact from the downed lines.
Most people affected by the outages had power restored by 5 p.m., said Ronnie Roark, a spokesman for Oncor, the energy delivery company for TXU. Crews were in the area working to correct continued outages Thursday evening, Roark said.
In addition to downed power lines along Veterans Memorial Boulevard in Harker Heights, the storm knocked down a section of traffic lights, blew over signs and about everything else that wasn't bolted down, said Harker Heights Fire Department Deputy Fire Chief Glenn Gallenstein.
"The bulk of the damage caused here by the storm was along Veterans Memorial Boulevard," Gallenstien said. "We also had one structure fire that was possibly caused by lighting."
The owners of a pickup truck escaped injuries when the roof of the Pancho's Mexican Buffet in Killeen was blown off.
First, a 2-by-4 board crashed through its sunroof, while the truck's owners were sitting in the cab of the truck. When they exited the vehicle, a portion of the restaurant's roof crashed through the camper shell over the bed of a truck.
No one was injured when about a 3,500-square-foot section of the roof of the Ellison High School Auditorium was blown off, said Bob Massey, the Killeen school's spokesman.
Massey said that even though the roof sustained major damage, there was only a small leak.
Due to the damage, Massey said the Elementary Festival of Choirs scheduled today at EHS has been moved to the Shoemaker High School Auditorium.
The Killeen Municipal Airport lost power around 2:20 p.m., said Jim Livingston, the airport operations manager. Power was restored at 3:30 p.m., but the outages and severe weather caused several delays and cancellations for both commercial airlines operating out of the airport.
"The weather itself probably caused some delays rather than the damage," Livingston said, adding that the airport only experienced minor damage.
The most significant damage at the airport was to a privately owned plane that was housed in a partially enclosed hangar. Wind caused the small plane to turn inside the hangar, leading to damage to the tail of the plane.
Elsewhere across the state, the Associated Press reported two tractor-trailer rigs were blown over on Interstate 20 in Mitchell County west of Abilene just before 11 a.m., injuring one person and closing the westbound lanes for about an hour, said sheriff's dispatcher Rick Bullard.
Part of a school gym roof collapsed Thursday afternoon in Holliday in Archer County, Municipal Court Clerk Gerri Gilliland said. No students were inside at the time. Some were in the cafeteria, which is attached to the gym, but they escaped unharmed, she said.
A Baptist church's gym was destroyed and the roof was torn off of a Sonic fast-food restaurant in Seymour, about 50 miles southwest of Wichita Falls, city administrator Joe Shephard said.
A small tornado touched down in Jones County, where mobile homes were flipped over, electrical poles were downed and trees were uprooted after the storm hit shortly before noon, said chief Deputy Felix Ortiz of the Jones County Sheriff's Department in Anson.
At Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, departing flights were delayed anywhere from 45 minutes to two hours, and arriving flights were delayed 45 minutes to one hour Thursday afternoon, said airport spokesman Ken Capps.
All airport traffic was stopped for about 20 minutes because of lightning but reopened about 3 p.m., and no injuries or damage were reported. Because of the storm, 37 planes that were to land at DFW were diverted to other airports, Capps said.
At Love Field in Dallas, all traffic also was halted for 20 minutes, airport spokeswoman Lynetta Moore said. Arriving and departing Southwest Airlines flights were running about 30 minutes late, she said.
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